‘Take it down!’: Estonian parents’ and pre-teens’ opinions and experiences with sharenting

Abstract

Semi-structured individual interviews with 14 Estonian mothers and their children (aged 9–13 years) pairs who had ‘friended’ each other on Facebook were carried out to study pre-teens’ and parents’ reflections and experiences regarding information disclosures and sharenting on Facebook. We wanted to know what kind of information mothers shared about their children on Facebook and how the children perceived and reacted to such posts. Our findings indicated that there was a major discrepancy in the parents’ and children’s views about whether a parent should ask for permission to upload child-related content on social media. Pre-teens were often frustrated by their mothers’ sharenting practices, which led to privacy boundary turbulence between parents and the children. Raising the awareness of parents is crucial as children not only feel a need to negotiate the terms of acceptable information sharing with their parents but also expect their parents to respect their views on the topic.

Keywords

social media Facebook digital parenting parents pre-teens privacy sharenting

Introduction

Research indicates ‘that mothers are increasingly seeing social media in general, and Facebook in particular, as a ubiquitous part of their parenting experience’ (Archer and Kao, 2018: 134). In fact, becoming a Facebook friend with your child is one of the often-explored ways parents use to communicate with their children online (Burke et al., 2013). Studies suggest that many parents join social media to be able to keep in touch with their children but also to monitor their practices (Child and Petronio, 2011), and to get a better idea of the child’s online behaviour, content creation and friendships (Child and Westermann, 2013). However, more recent studies (see, for example, Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2017; Brosch, 2016) reveal that parents often fail to critically reflect on their own online practices, which at times may lead to parental oversharing and thereby not only introduce new risks to children’s identities and privacy but may also jeopardise the parent–child relationship (Moser et al., 2017).

Various policy documents (e.g. Recommendation CM/REC (2018)/7 of the Committee of Ministers to Member States) emphasise the role of parents and caregivers in protecting children’s privacy, personal data and online reputation, and the need to respect the confidentiality of children’s correspondence. At the same time, empirical studies (see Marasli et al., 2017; Wagner and Gasche, 2018) indicate that a significant number of parents share information and photographs of their children on social networking sites (SNS), often without considering their children’s privacy. On the one hand, parents, as the gatekeepers of the personal information of their children, have the right to decide how much and what kind of information they share about their children (Marasli et al., 2017); on the other hand, parents must balance the benefits and their imminent right to share with their children’s right to privacy (Wagner and Gasche, 2018).

Regardless of the growing scholarly interest in social media use and disclosures of parents and their practices of sharenting, that is, the ways many parents share details about their children’s lives online (Steinberg, 2017), the majority of studies so far have focused on presenting the opinions, experiences and practices of parents (see Ammari et al., 2015; Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2017; Brosch, 2016; Chalken and Anderson, 2017; Wagner and Gasche, 2018) and little research has investigated the opinions and experiences of children (see Levy, 2017). Furthermore, there is a lack of studies that include the views and experiences of both parents and their children (cf. Moser et al., 2017) and which tackle the issue from a qualitative point of view (cf. Ammari et al., 2015; Chalken and Anderson, 2017; Wagner and Gasche, 2018).

The majority of current studies on sharenting have been carried out in the United States (see Davis and James, 2012; Moser et al., 2017), but there are only a few studies on sharenting from other cultural contexts, for example, from Western (see Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2017; Chalken and Anderson, 2017; Wagner and Gasche, 2018) or Eastern Europe (e.g. Brosch, 2016). Considering the cross-national differences in socialisation cultures (Kirwil et al., 2009), parenting paradigms (Talves and Kalmus, 2015) and differences in the uptake of digital technologies, more information on the topic is needed.

This article aims to provide more information on this topic by exploring the attitudes and experiences concerning sharenting discovered through an interview study with 14 mother–child pairs (ages 9–13) in Estonia. We believe that investigating the topic in Estonia, a country where the uptake of SNS use among ‘under-age’ children is one of the highest in Europe and where parents are relatively untroubled by their children’s early uptake of digital technologies (Talves and Kalmus, 2015), could provide some interesting insight on the topic. Relying on the communication privacy management theory (CPM) of Sandra Petronio (2002), our aim was to study pre-teens’ and parents’ reflections and experiences regarding information sharing and privacy in the context of their Facebook friendships. Furthermore, we aimed to investigate both the pre-teens’ and mothers’ opinions and experiences regarding sharenting through exploring what kind of information the mothers shared about their children on Facebook, and how the children perceived and reacted to such posts.

Literature review

Practices of sharenting

Sharing the joys and challenges of parenthood and documenting children’s lives publicly through stories and photographs have become social norms in the social media era (Clark et al., 2015). For many parents, SNS have become places to communicate with loved ones and where to seek and share advice about the parenting challenges they face (Archer and Kao, 2018). While doing so, however, parents have become accustomed to regularly posting and disclosing details about their children on social media, that is, engaging in sharenting (Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2017). In fact, according to the findings of the AVG Technologies (2010) survey carried out in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain, 81% of children under the age of two already have some digital footprint created by their parents. The findings of Brosch (2016) suggest that parents are most active in sharing photos, sharing on average 116 baby photos per account so as to chronicle both the most important events of their children’s lives, family holidays and spontaneous moments from daily life.

Children’s views and experiences of sharenting

Studies indicate that children often feel embarrassed, annoyed and frustrated by sharenting. For example, the findings of a recent study among 12- to 16-year-olds (N = 1000) in the United Kingdom reveal that the majority of the young respondents (71.3%) thought their parents did not respect their privacy online, and over one-third (39.8%) had experienced parents sharing embarrassing photos of them (Levy, 2017). In fact, children believe that the parent should not share information that reflects negatively on the child’s self-image or that is too revealing (see Moser et al., 2017). Thus, as argued by Steinberg (2017), children are not only concerned about preventing negative information about themselves from being used on their parent’s newsfeed, but also may not agree with a parent’s decision to share any personal information – negative or positive – about them in the online world.

In fact, recent empirical studies (see Hiniker et al., 2016; Moser et al., 2017) suggest that parents and children have very different attitudes about how often parents should ask permission to post about their children on social media. Hiniker et al. (2016) found that ‘children were twice as likely to report that parents should not “overshare” by posting information about their children online without permission’ (p. 1385). At the same time, children are not bothered by parents sharing positive information, such as achievements in school, doing well in sports or ‘information that reflects a positive parent-child relationship or happy family life’ (Moser et al., 2017: 4). Thus, finding the right balance between what kind of content to share and how often to share has become crucial for parents.

Sharenting and the dilemmas of privacy

CPM theory (Petronio, 2002) has often been used to illustrate the privacy dilemmas individuals encounter when managing their privacy and relationships on social media. Furthermore, CPM in families is often characterised by co-ownership of information and the corresponding family norms, learned privacy orientations and individual motivations, all of which have impacts on privacy ownership, privacy control and the occurrence of privacy boundary turbulence within the family (Miller et al., 2016).

Although many parents employ privacy settings on SNS to control who can see their personal information, privacy settings are not well understood by all users (Chalken and Anderson, 2017; Clark et al., 2015). Furthermore, while adults have the ability to set their own parameters when sharing their personal information on social media, children often have no control over the dissemination of their personal information by their parents. Instead, parents are afforded the right to make – and the responsibility for making – decisions on behalf of their children (Moser et al., 2017) and thus are the gatekeepers of their children’s information, which in the case of oversharing might lead to conflicts within a family (Steinberg, 2017).

Although scholars agree with the fact that parents’ sharenting practices and decisions to reveal private information about their children may introduce risks to the child’s privacy and identity, as well as to the parent–child relationship, no agreement on a solution has been reached so far. For example, some authors (see, for example, Sorensen, 2016) claim that parents should fully protect their child’s privacy, and thus not reveal any personal details or information until the child can choose to disclose it (or refrain from disclosing it) himself or herself as an autonomous adult, while others (Steinberg, 2017) argue for a ‘child-centred perspective on parents’ rights’. In short, the privacy dilemmas of parents are intensified by the battle of ‘relational versus individualistic conceptions of identity, ethics, privacy, and responsibility’ (Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2017: 112).

Method and data

Sample

The sample of our study consisted of 14 mother–child pairs (aged 9–13 years old, seven boys and seven girls). Even though we tried to achieve heterogeneity in terms of the parent’s gender, none of the fathers agreed to participate in the interviews. Still, considering that mothers have been found to be more active than fathers in communicating with their children on Facebook (Burke et al., 2013), we believe we were able to discuss the topic with the most information-rich parents.

As we aimed to study experiences and opinions regarding parent–child interactions on Facebook, we used strategic sampling (Trost, 1986) and set out to find families in which the parent and child were each other’s Facebook friends. We decided to concentrate on parent–child interactions on Facebook, as Facebook is by far the most popular SNS in Estonia (Kõuts et al., 2017), and thus we considered it the most likely platform where both parents and pre-teens would have their own accounts. Furthermore, we were especially interested in studying the experiences of under-age Facebook users, as research has suggested that ‘many parents now knowingly allow or assist their children in circumventing age restrictions’ on Facebook (Boyd et al., 2011). Following the objectives of the study, the age of the children participating had to be 13 or younger and both the parent and the child had to be regular users of Facebook.

The sample was heterogeneous regarding the length of time the participants had their Facebook accounts, ranging from 5 to 11 years in the case of mothers, and a couple of months to 5 years in the case of the children (Table 1).

Table 1.

Description of the sample.

	Code (family code/gender/age)	Time being a Facebook user	Sender of the friend request	Main activities in Facebook
Family 1	A1Boy (13)	1 year	From child to parent	Chatting with friends (Messenger), scrolling timeline
	A1Mother (41)	4 years	From child to parent	Messenger, reading news, scrolling timeline
Family 2	A2Boy (13)	3 months	From parent to child	Messenger
	A2Mother (42)	5 years	From parent to child	Messenger
Family 3	B1Girl (10)	Couple of months	From parent to child	Scrolling timeline to look and comment photos
	B1Mother (33)	10 years	From parent to child	Reading news, buying things, scrolling timeline
Family 4	B2Boy (11)	5 years	From child to parent	Messenger, scrolling timeline
	B2Mother (33)	10 years	From child to parent	Messenger, scrolling timeline, buying and selling things
Family 5	C1Girl (10)	3 years	From parent to child	Messenger
	C1Mother (34)	6 years	From parent to child	Messenger
Family 6	C2Boy (12)	4 years	From child to parent	Messenger
	C2Mother (45)	7 years	From child to parent	Messenger
Family 7	D1Girl(10)	2 years	From child to parent	Messenger, scrolling timeline (what friends post there)
	D1Mother (41)	7 years	From child to parent	Messenger, scrolling timeline
Family 8	D2Boy (13)	1 year	From child to parent	Messenger, scrolling timeline
	D2Mother (37)	6 years	From child to parent	Reading news, scrolling timeline, Messenger
Family 9	E1Girl (11)	1 year	From child to parent	Messenger, Facebook groups, scrolling timeline
	E1Mother (31)	7 years	From child to parent	Reading news, Facebook groups, scrolling timeline
Family 10	E2Girl (9)	1 year	From child to parent	Messenger
	E2Mother (46)	8 years	From child to parent	Scrolling timeline, Messenger
Family 11	F1Boy (11)	2 years	From parent to child	Messenger
	F1Mother (38)	7 years	From parent to child	Messenger
Family 12	F2Girl (13)	2 years	Don’t remember	Messenger
	F2Mother (35)	7 years	Don’t remember	Messenger
Family 13	G1Boy (13)	5 years	From parent to child	Messenger, reading news, scrolling timeline
	G1Mother (42)	6 years	From parent to child	Reading news, scrolling timeline
Family 14	G2Boy (10)	Half a year	From child to parent	Messenger
	G2Mother (34)	11 years	From child to parent	Messenger, sharing photos and moments of everyday life

The respondents were found using snowball sampling. We first contacted the potential respondents through Facebook, provided them with an overview of the study, outlined its purposes, methods of data collection and analysis and explained how the gathered data would be used. The parent then talked to the child and when both of them agreed to participate, the times for the interviews were scheduled. All the participants signed the consent forms and the mothers also signed the documents confirming that their children could participate in the study.

Method

The data were gathered using a semi-structured interview method as this method allows greater flexibility of coverage and enables the interviewer to question the interviewees’ responses in greater detail. Furthermore, similar to Horton et al. (2004), we believe the method enabled us to discover novel areas and produce richer data. The interview questions were the same for both the children and their mothers. Face-to-face interviews were conducted individually with the respondents in their homes and organised so that the presence of other family members would not distract the respondents and responses would be as honest and complete as possible. The interviews with the mothers lasted between 35 and 45 minutes and the interviews with the pre-teens were approximately 25–30 minutes long.

The style of the interviews was based on a qualitative interviewing technique consisting of a flexible coverage of topics and questions (Patton, 2002). A prepared interview schedule with open-ended questions was used to help guide the interviews. The interviews with the respondents focused on three main topics. First, the respondents were asked to describe their own social media usage practices, after which conversations moved on to their opinions and experiences with privacy in the context of parent–child Facebook friendships, for example, disclosure norms and family agreements, and practices of monitoring each other’s Facebook use. In the context of this article, we will focus on their reflections and opinions regarding disclosure norms and sharenting.

Interview transcripts were analysed horizontally combining the principles of cross-case analysis and the grounded theory approach described by Corbin and Strauss (1990). The responses were given flexible conceptual labels, and the labels were grouped into (sub)categories which formed (sub)themes. Then, all relevant categories were unified around a core category and irrelevant codes were excluded. A literature search was carried out after the empirical data had been analysed and the core category, experiences and opinions about sharenting had emerged.

Results and discussion

Reflections on sharenting: parents’ views and practices

Although some mothers in our sample believed that Facebook was not the right platform for sharing family-related information, the majority of our interviewees posted both texts and photos about their families and children on Facebook. Thus, similar to the findings of others (see Ammari et al., 2015), our interviews revealed that the mothers were very active in tagging their children and in posting photos from various family events (e.g. birthdays and family trips) and their everyday life:

[I post] All the time, well not all the time but very often. Everywhere we go together, I tag him instantly, I tag my children every time I’m with them. (C2Mother (42))

Some mothers in our sample, however, stated that they used to post much more children-related content before the children got their own personal Facebook accounts. Thus, they had benignly started to create ‘digital shadows’ (Leaver, 2015) for their children, that is, posting information about the child on Facebook when the child was not in control of the information posted. At the same time, our interviews indicated that some of the mothers had also adjusted their sharenting practices after the child got their own social media accounts:

I think that when she did not have her own account on Instagram, then I uploaded more photos of her, but after [she got her own account] I generally avoided it … I am also not the user who tags. Sometimes she tags herself on the photos, using my phone. But when you wanted to tag her, would you also ask for her permission before doing so? In general, I asked. (C1Mother (34))

The extract above indicates that through the creation of a personal social media account, the mother became more reluctant to agree with the co-ownership of the information (Petronio, 2010) to be shared by the child while creating her own identity. Furthermore, most of the families in our sample had agreed upon some privacy rules that helped to govern how and what kind of information was to be shared on social media. For example, parents had forbidden the children to share their full names, ages, relationship status or private contact information (e.g. home address, e-mail and phone number) on social media, warned against befriending strangers and posting too actively. However, these privacy boundaries were established for the children only, rather than being applied to all family members. The lack of such clearly negotiated rules for the adults in the family may also be an aspect which has encouraged oversharing of children’s private information by the parents.

Reflections on sharenting: pre-teens’ views and experiences

Our interviews with pre-teens indicated that the young have mixed feelings about their mothers’ social media behaviour. On the one hand, the pre-teens were happy and proud when they noticed their mothers were sharing posts about their achievements (e.g. doing well in sports/in school/in hobbies) or had posted photos reflecting their happy family life. On the other hand, they had often experienced negative feelings due to their mothers’ posts. In particular, children did not want their parents to share unflattering visuals (e.g. ‘ugly photos’ or ‘when my hair is messed up’), which would reflect negatively on their self-images:

Do you like the fact that your mother is sharing photos of you on Facebook? Sometimes, but when I look ugly on the photo, then I really don’t like it. Has there been an occasion that your mother has posted a photo of you that has angered you? Yes, one-time she uploaded a photo of me where I was jumping on a trampoline and it was summer. And you did not like the photo? Not really. Why did you feel bothered? I looked so strange in the photo. Did you ask your mother to remove the photo? Yes, and she promised that she would delete it but she probably forgot. (G2(10))

Thus, as argued by Moser et al. (2017: 4), although children have nothing against parents sharing content that helps to create positive online identities of their children, they do not like parents sharing content that could be seen as embarrassing, visually unflattering or otherwise negative. Furthermore, although research has found that parents use endearments (e.g. ‘my sweetheart’, ‘my little princess’ and ‘my sunshine’) with pre-teens on Facebook in what they considered loving ways (Burke et al., 2013), pre-teens in our sample found the practice highly annoying and unsuitable in public Facebook posts.

Privacy boundary turbulence in views about sharenting

Similar to the findings of others (see Hiniker et al., 2016; Moser et al., 2017), our interviews revealed considerable differences in views about how often a parent should ask for permission to post about their child on social media. Although some mothers acknowledged the need to consult with their children before posting or tagging them on SNS, in reality, children’s opinions on the topic were rarely considered:

Do you ask permission from your child to post information about her/him on Facebook? No I don’t … In fact, I could and should, but for some reason I do not ask. (F1Mother (38))

In fact, even when the parents knew that their children resented sharenting, they still continued this practice despite the children’s wishes, justifying their actions by referring to the young age of the child, or the fact that they as parents had the right to control and decide which information they shared about their children on social media.

She sometimes says ‘aah, don’t upload it anywhere’ … but I think I have the right to upload or not; she is still too young [to decide]. (B1Mother (33))

Can you recall if you have ever felt bad about the posts your mother has made? Well, when she uploaded a photo where I was with my brother holding onto a tree, then I commented that I look so stupid. Why? Because I had such a stupid face on the photo. Where you upset that your mother posted that photo? Yes. I did not like that at all. And did you also tell your mother that? Yes. And what did she do? She still did not remove the photo. (B1Child (10))

Our interviews indicate that either due to the misunderstandings of privacy boundaries or misconceptions about the ownership of rights, practices of sharenting may sometimes also lead to ‘privacy boundary turbulence’ (Petronio, 2002), which in this study emerged when the children’s desired privacy levels were inconsistent with how their parents treated their information. In short, our interviews with pre-teens revealed that the young desired limits on information co-ownership (Miller et al., 2016). Some mothers had learned from their errors of judgement and adjusted their actions accordingly. For example, several mothers in the sample acknowledged instances when their children had asked them either to remove some posts or to seek permission before uploading certain content:

Do you ask permission from your child to post information about them on Facebook? F2Mother (35): Well … I haven’t asked … [permission from her child]. We once had a conversation and she said ‘you did not even ask for my permission’, and then I asked if she would have agreed [with me posting the information] and she said she would have. After that I promised that the next time I would ask her [permission]. It is feasible to ask. I have also uploaded photos of my son, and then I also started to think once that maybe he did not want to have such photos of himself [on social media] in the future.

Thus, these mothers had to change their sharenting practices through the active boundary co-ordination efforts (Petronio, 2002) of their children. Several pre-teens expressed their frustration when noticing that their mothers had uploaded content without consulting them first. In fact, the majority of the children in our sample said that they would appreciate it if their parents actually asked their opinions and permission before posting on Facebook. However, mothers in our sample often did not realise what an upsetting practice sharenting was for their children, and even if they were aware of their children’s feelings, they did not acknowledge them as real or worthy of paying attention to:

I would ‘like’ his photos but he does not upload any photos. Maybe once a year he uploads a photo. I uploaded one photo of him and sent it to his timeline and he was annoyed by that. Do you ask for your child’s permission to upload content about him on Facebook? No I don’t and he doesn’t allow me to either (laughing). But I still tag him and he doesn’t like when I take photos of him, but I still upload those too. /…/I post random photos, and he just does not like that I tag him; he immediately says ‘don’t take a photo, don’t do it, don’t upload’, but I still do. I am also in that photo, so I want to upload it, but he does not like it. (E1Mother (31))

The extract above illustrates that struggles between the parents and the children might occur due to the fact that children’s privacy expectations were violated and not taken seriously by the parents (cf. Child and Petronio, 2011).

Conclusion

Similar to the findings of others (see Marasli et al., 2017; Wagner and Gasche, 2018), our interviews with Estonian pre-teens and their mothers revealed that sharenting has become a ubiquitous part of the present-day parenting experience for many parents. The majority of mothers in our sample felt quite comfortable with sharing photos and information about their children on SNS and were not very concerned about the potential of introducing new risks to their children’s identities and privacy. Thus, as pointed out by Chalken and Anderson (2017), the pleasure and affordances that may derive from sharenting outweigh the potential privacy risks for many parents. At the same time, this general lack of concern about the potential privacy risks could also be related to the fact that Estonians are one of the most easygoing nations in Europe regarding their opinions about publishing personal information online (Special Eurobarometer 431, 2015).

In comparison to the relatively unconcerned views expressed by the mothers, pre-teens in our sample were often frustrated by their mothers’ sharenting practices and engaged in active boundary co-ordination efforts (Petronio, 2002) in the hopes of co-managing their online identities. Although the pre-teens were happy and proud to see their mothers’ sharing information about them that reflected positively on their self-image, they did not like parents sharing content they considered embarrassing, visually unflattering or otherwise negative. Furthermore, similar to the findings of others (e.g. Hiniker et al., 2016; Moser et al., 2017), our results indicate that there was a great discrepancy between the parents’ and children’s views about whether a parent should ask for permission to upload child-related content on SNS. In fact, the lack of such unified family privacy rules that applied equally to all of the members of the family could be a potential reason for the occurrence of privacy boundary turbulence (Petronio, 2010) that could in turn cause stress in the child–parent relationship. Thus, raising the awareness of parents on this topic is crucial as children not only feel a need to negotiate the terms of acceptable information sharing with their parents, but they also expect their parents to respect their views on the topic.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The preparation of this article was supported by a research project “PUT44” financed by Estonian Research Council.

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